There is a plot in a Long Island cemetery that is marked for Jones. Paid for, too, because sometimes they were such goddamn planners. It makes her stomach twist to think of it. What a shitty way to try and save your marriage, right? Buy a cemetery plot, swear with the blasphemy of a down payment, and make death seem like an accomplishment.
Hey Mom, I'm standing by your grave and there's nobody in it.
She presses her knuckles into her mouth and bites down so that her teeth are gripping into her flesh, so that she's centered and she's not looking down at oatmeal-colored grass and gray, gray stones. Like she's not across from an auto dealership blaring unlimited financing, reminding her that everything is a capitalist nightmare.
Reminding her that everyone she loves is dead and gone, in one way or another.
Hey Mom, I'm standing—
.
She gets Alisa's body cremated because symmetry, right? Have three bags of ashes, just like always, only this time, all three of them are real.
Her mom has two faces now, in her mind.
And so does Trish.
Jess hates that. Jess hates Trish, and yet she doesn't. A few flakes of Phillip's ashes are probably plastered to her unworthy floorboards, and she doesn't hear Kilgrave in her head anymore but she still feels him in her dreams.
That's healing for you. That is the goddamn bullshit that passes for healing.
Fuck, I can't believe she shot you in the head. I can't believe I saw your eyes go—out. It's like a light switch and like a train going off down a tunnel, and shit, I can't do this. I can't come up with the words for what happened to you.
.
Long Island is a sand dune that shouldn't exist, or something, and it's not where any of her family will be buried. Not now. She almost doesn't know why she came at all, why she felt it would do any good to plant her feet on empty ground.
Closure?
Can't be that. She's done with therapists. She just stares at the chalky sky and breathes in through her nostrils. That's what most people do, she thinks, when they pray.
She. Her. Then, now, and the last one here.
.
Jessica doesn't believe in God.
If he exists, he must believe in her.
She doesn't like that, the forced reciprocity. It reminds her of all the ways she has climbed mountains and plummeted off them, head-first.
.
Trish sends her flowers on her birthday. It is strangely brutal, to receive pristine calla lilies and a card that says, Love, Trish.
It is like something Trish's mother would do. And that isn't fair, oh, not at all. It's not fair to compare Trish to the woman who used to force her fingers down Trish's throat, even if Trish forced a bullet into another woman's head.
Even if that other woman was a mother, too.
Jess throws away the card and keeps the lilies.
What does that say about Jess?
.
It's not journaling if it's letters, right? I've never journaled in my life. Oh, for shit's sake. You were a raging psychopath and the world is probably safer without you. Too bad I'm not the world.
I want you to come back.
.
Ashes, again. These don't go in a bag. These don't join the beloved, the faithful departed. These ashes are just Jess's notebook, sparked by a Bic lighter, toasted ruthlessly over the trashcan under her desk.
The flames, while they burned, kept her warm.
.
So. Not on Long Island then. Maybe she should scatter them over water, fingers greasy with the memories of everyone she's ever loved, maybe she should take the calla lilies with her. Goodbye, goodbye, and don't mind me to the other ferry-goers, who don't understand anything about the inner workings of someone who has spent more time with whiskey in her veins than blood.
But the whiskey, she put there. And agency and choice—even if the choice is to fuck your whole system up with poison—is a very powerful thing.
.
Her mother had two faces, and then she died and Jessica cremated her. That is the whole story, except when it isn't.
There are three parcels of ash in the Alias office, and Jessica wonders if it's time to let them go.
.
(Softly, then.)
Hey Mom, but this time, it's out loud, she burned the book and it's out loud.
(It's so loud.)
(Softly, then.)
"Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad. Hey…" Fuck, it's always hardest to say his name. "Hey, Phillip."
She walked east until she couldn't walk any further, and now she's here, standing over the edge of the river, with all that is left of her family in her hands.
"I can't promise I'll be around forever." There are only pigeons to hear her; what an unexpected mercy, to be alone in the city. "So I figured this was actually safest. Best way to make sure you all—get where you need to go."
She doesn't say I love you because it's all she's ever known of them, every day since Alisa showed up in her life—and every day, after.
She empties the bags one after another after another. The water is glittering and the sky is chalky overhead, and Jessica is breathing deeply when she breathes at all.
She isn't praying, but this comes close.